What Wallace Shawn Did Before His “Moth Days”
On April 1st, in a cozy subterranean dressing room at Greenwich House Theatre, before curtain for Wallace Shawn’s play “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” two understudies prepared for their débuts. The play has four characters: a husband (Josh Hamilton), a wife (Maria Dizzia), their son (John Early), and the husband’s secret girlfriend (Hope Davis). That day, Dizzia and Davis had both tested positive for COVID, so Shawn, eighty-two, and his partner, Deborah Eisenberg, eighty, had agreed to fill in—Eisenberg as the wife and Shawn as the girlfriend. The switcheroo was particularly charged because “Moth Days” centers on an urbane Manhattan family with strong similarities to and differences from Shawn’s own: Dick, the husband, is a happy-go-lucky novelist (the playwright’s father, William Shawn, was the editor of this magazine for thirty-five years); Elaine, the mistress, is a pulp-fiction writer (William Shawn had a decades-long relationship with one of his star reporters, Lillian Ross); Tim, the son, is an articulate wastrel.
The dressing room had a haimish vibe: red floor, lighted mirrors, chessboard. Shawn, script in hand, wore a black heated jacket and jeans; he sat beside Early, mustachioed and leather-jacketed. “We haven’t had a chance to read through this scene,” Shawn said. “And we only have twenty-six minutes.” They began rehearsing, observed by Eisenberg, white-haired and composed; Hamilton, putting socks on; and the producer Scott Rudin, beaming, in a tan sweater and sneakers adorned with cartoon eyeballs. In the scene, the son and the girlfriend meet for a glass of wine to discuss the father, who has died.
“I think you and I would have liked each other!” Shawn, as the girlfriend, said, in his inimitable way: incisive, melodic, wry. “I said to your father all the time, ‘Look, I know it would be a little bit dishonest, but couldn’t the three of us just secretly meet?’ ” In the background, Hamilton took photographs.
“Moth Days” is directed, with minimal staging, by Shawn’s collaborator of many decades, André Gregory. The characters sit in chairs and speak in eloquent monologues, “My Dinner with André” style.
“I guess he figured that if you and he and I had been secretly visiting with each other, that would add to the sneakiness and sleaziness of the whole situation,” Shawn, as the girlfriend, went on. (“Company, this is your half-hour call,” a voice on the P.A. said.) A few beats later, Early, as Tim, said that he was raised “to be so decent, and yet I’m as sleazy as they come!” They laughed. “Maybe it’s for the best that we didn’t ever meet,” Early said. “These two sleazy people. We might have become mean.”
“Mean! Yes! Mean! Mean!” Shawn cried. They laughed more, as did Rudin, who seemed to be having the time of his life.
Early, as himself, said, “I’m not going to say the next line. In the play, I will.” It was 6:41 P.M. “Oh, my God.” He pointed at Shawn and Eisenberg and announced, “The two of them should eat something.” Eisenberg walked to Shawn and rubbed his balding head affectionately.
“It’ll be amazing! A total blast,” Rudin said.
Onstage, Shawn apologized to the audience for the changeup, but said that, understudy-wise, “Deborah Eisenberg and I are, frankly, the people in New York City most equipped to play these parts.” The audience laughed. The performance went well—the chemistry between Shawn and Early a particular highlight. The actors bowed, looking relieved. Back in the dressing room, the mood was buoyant.
“It was surreal and wonderful,” Hamilton said.
“Extremely weird,” Eisenberg said.
“It was Scott’s idea for Deborah and me to be the understudies, many months ago,” Shawn said. “Of course, the expectation is that the understudy will never go on.”
“That’s certainly what I expected,” Eisenberg said. They’d got the call that morning. “I’d just finished preparing my taxes, which is where my mind has been,” she said. “All my anxiety has been about my taxes and not about doing the show.”
“I wrote it, but we’ve both seen it many, many times,” Shawn said. “We do know the play well.”
“Speak for yourself,” Eisenberg said. “I love the play, but it’s vast, vast. It keeps unfolding.” The cast had rehearsed “Moth Days” for more than a year and a half, Shawn said. “And, inevitably, it’s absorbed into their bones.”
Eisenberg added, “And the premise is, I don’t even know how to articulate this, but you’re not pretending anything. You’re having an experience. Maria Dizzia is uncanny, phenomenal. But there’s no way I could try to be like Maria. I could only do it as I can do it.”
“André wouldn’t want us to imitate them,” Shawn said. “That would be absolutely against his way of working.”
Would they reprise these roles the next night? “Of course, unless Scott was horrified,” Shawn said. “But, you know, I haven’t seen him in such a good mood for a long time.” ♦